In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” Gloria Anzaldua uses the rhetorical appeal of pathos to communicate her feelings and personal struggles between language and identity. Her essay is a cathartic and complex expression of her frustrations of being discriminated against for the language she spoke, the culture she came from and her being a woman. She grew up on the border of Mexico and Texas, “Borderlands” and border tongues. Her language was neither here nor there. Her technique of using different languages and voices pushes her audience away but her vivid and distressing flashbacks, anecdotes, and imagery use sympathy to draw you back and understand her on an emotional level.

When reading Anzualda’s essay, what is immediately visible is her varied juxtapositional use of multiple voices, languages and literary styles that shift throughout her writing. First you are reading English than she will randomly throw in a poem, then switch to Spanish, then a combination known as “Spanglish.” When she interweaves the Spanish into the work she does so without any translation to catch the reader off guard. The audience is not sure from one sentence to the next or from one paragraph to the next where Anzaldua will take the reader next. This hodgepodge of styles, voices, unpleasant flashbacks and languages creates an emotionally interactive experience with the reader. Oneexample where Anzaldua uses both Spanish and a poem at once to push the reader away but later draw them back in is in the passage, “Deslenguadas. Somos los del espanol deficiente.

We are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestizaje, the subject of your burla. Because we speak the tongues of fire we are culturally crucified. Racially, culturally and linguistically somos huerfanos- we speak an orphan tongue” (80). Although her syntax and diction of using multiple voices and languages keeps the prose alive, interesting and unpredictable it can simultaneously frustrate and alienate the reader which is precisely what she wants. “As long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate” (81). She wants the English readers to “accommodate” her and her language and accept it when reading her writings. At the same time she wants to, in a sense, “legitimize” her language and make if worthy by writing it in that format.

She uses Spanish to make the reader to feel uncomfortable and to be forced to be in her shoes. You are seeing the world through Anzaldua’s eyes. This tactic is convincing and backs up her strong polemical expression. Her language is very important to her. “Until I take pride in my language, I can not take pride in myself” (81).

“Until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas, Spanish, Tex Mex and all other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself.” Here she explains her psychological reasoning behind mixing languages in her text. Not only is it to alienate the white audience the same way she herself felt alienated her whole life, it is to accept herself the way she is with the language she speaks. Here is both an explanation to the reader and a vulnerability she’s exposing. She is at odds with the love she has for herself and her language and wants to love and embrace it fully. A transitional part of the essay for me was when she used both multiple languages and anecdotes to bring about empathy from the reader.

Upon hearing for the first time the word “Us” or nosotras in Spanish for two women, she didn’t know that was that even a word existed and was shocked. “Chicanos use nosotros whether we’re male or female. We are robbed of our female being by the masculine plural. Language is a male discourse” (76). The power of language and how it relates to identity is illustrated here. She depicts how the language she knew and grew up with could sometimes be patriarchal. Using graphic metaphors, adages and personification Anzaldua interweaves a constant cinematic theme of mouths and tongues throughout the essay to symbolize language and to make the abstract concept of language more physically tangible.

She starts out at the dentist’s office where the dentist is complaining that her tongue keeps getting in the way of him working on her mouth. “We are going to have to do something about your tongue. I’ve never seen anything as strong or as stubborn” (75). Later she wonders, “And I think how do you train a wild tongue, train it to be quiet, how do you bridle and saddle it, make it lie down.

” Here she is paralleling the tongue to a wild animal, a horse or dog. “Flies don’t enter a closed mouth” – a saying about how women should not talk too much. In another passage, “the wilderness has dried out our tongues and we have forgotten speech.“ The cumulative effect of using both mouth and tongue metaphors creates a visceral visual image in our head to the physical tongues and the abstract portrayal of language. Here these metaphors of animals, mouths, and tongues allude to a wild and unbridled image of animals that are disobedient to make the reader relate to how Anzaldua feels criticized like a disobedient animal. More animal images in the passage, “Being Mexican is a state of soul- not one of mind, not one of citizenship.

Neither eagle nor serpent, but both. And like the ocean neither animal respects borders” (84). Here the animals are a metaphor for instinctual wild creatures, unable to be tamed or understand boundaries. We feel her sense of shame when she remembers being scolded on the courtyard at school for speaking Spanish in America and we feel empathy for her. “Good for three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler” (75). Another time she was criticized was when she taught high school English in an American school.

During this time she was teaching mostly Latino students and wanted to include Chicano works. She was reprimanded by the principle. Additionally, in graduate school she had to fight to make “Chicano literature” an area of focus. We feel her frustrations, sadness and anger during these flashbacks. An area in the text where she feels pride for her culture is when she reads Chicano authors and poets getting published. “I felt like we really existed as people,” she said. She also felt pride when the Chicano Movement was born in 1965 with the help of Cesar Chavez.

“Chicanos did not know we were a people until 1965” (85). Vivid imagery comes to play when Anzaldua talks about the her childhood and her identity to Latino culture relating to memory, emotion, music and smell. Here we are transported into her world as a child around family and comforting food. ”Homemade white cheese sizzling in a pan, melting inside a folded tortilla.

My sister Hilda’s hot spicy menudo chile colorodo, making it deep red, pieces of panza and homin floating on top” (83). Listening as a child in the summer to corridos (songs about love and death), “The corridos are usually about Mexican heroes who do valiant deeds against the Anglo oppressors.” (83) Her feelings about her culture and her hybrid languages are also mixed with complexity and confusion.

In this passage, “we use our language differences against each other”(80), there are certain hierarchies within the subtle variations of Spanish. “With Chicanas from Nuevo Mexico or Arizona I will speak Chicano Spanish a little, but often they don’t understand what I’m saying. With most California Chicanos I speak entirely in English (unless I forget).

When I first moved to San Francisco I would rattle off something in Spanish, unintentionally embarrassing them. Often it is only with another Chicana Tejana that I can talk freely“ (78). We see her confusion and frustration and can relate to her on a human level even though the reader has never encountered anything like this themselves, they can empathize with her psychological state.

In the following passage not only does Anzaldua appeal to sympathy, there is a self-righteousness and confrontation when she says, “If you really want to hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity” (81). Here she uses assonance (twin skin) and defensive tone to persuade. She is subconsciously making the reader feel accused and guilty.

Any kind of good art, whether it writing, painting, film, or music makes you question. She doesn’t give you answers so much as allows you to ask questions and challenges you. However, it is a balance between using these emotional tactics to illicit emotion from a reader to question a notion and being aware or “forced” emotionally to feel a certain way. She balances her appeal of pathos by having the reader feel at once confronted and sympathetic.

Her stories are authentic and her feelings visceral, so we trust her. She is convincing and persuasive in her tactics of pathos appeal. Anzaldua’s use of Spanish, English, prose and poetry were effective in creating an emotional appeal to me.

Her writing, although sometimes abstract, is very poetic and gets her points across well. Her use of metaphor, personification and imagery make her writing sensory and interesting. Her nuanced emotional feelings of her culture were clear. Her labyrinth of complex emotional states – shame, pride, anger – help us relate to her and feel sympathy for her struggles with both her language and identity of being Latino in America.

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